Project Scope

Amazon has noticed that the users of their Kindle app rely on book recommendations from people in their social network;  based on this information Amazon has decided to make social features a prominent aspect of the Kindle app. To accomplish this Amazon wants to integrate the ability to form book clubs through the app; users can either create their own book club or participate in someone else's. The specifics for the feature were:

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• Users have the ability to create a book club, invite members, and set specific
  parameters for the club.

• Be able to search for and join a book club.

• Users who become a member of a book club should be able to communicate.

Hypothesis

To guide our research we began with a hypothesis:​

We believe by adding a book club feature to the Kindle app, where
users can connect with each other, create, and join private book
clubs, and subscribe to public groups, we will create a social
network where users can find book recommendations easily and

increase e-book sales.

Interviews & Synthesis

To understand why users depend on recommendations to make decisions for new books, we broadened our inquiry not just to book clubs, but to understanding an individuals motivations and pain points of joining and running a club in general. We created two proto-archetypes: the club joiner and club leader; which served as categories for our screen survey and interviews. From that, we gained several insights for the club joiner and club leader:

Leader Insights

Motivations:
Self-improvement, grow a bigger social network,
competition, organizing, makes friends with similar
interests, creating opportunities to learn

Pain Points:
Number of attendees fluctuate, upset when
members lose interest, inactive members

Joiner Insights

Motivations:
Members desire to participate in an intellectual
safe space that has beneficial information
pertaining to their interests and offers insight to
other member’s perspectives. Members will stick
with a club if it has good structure.

Pain Points :
Inconsistent, schedule unorganized

User Personas

From the insights, that we gathered through our interviews, we created two personas to represent our users. James, the leader persona, being the primary persona.

Contructing our personas lead us to our how might we? question:

James is the leader of an online book club. He enjoys being apart of an active
community where he can gain deeper insights on a book he loves; however, he
gets frustrated when readers are not keeping up and become inactive.

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How might we use the Kindle iOS app to keep his members accountable?

Comparative/Comparitive Analysis

In our analysis, Amazon's other app—also website— Goodreads, had may features their website, such as the ability to create a book club and lend a book to a member, were not present on the mobile app. Also, although Amazon owns Goodreads, it is treated as a different product; this leaves room for a new feature. 

Design Studio

We conducted two sessions of design studio, along with utilizing Feature Prioritization method MoSCoW: Must

,Could, Should, Won't. 

Usability Testing

As we completed our sketches and decided on a design we created a mid-fidelity prototype to test a user's ability to browse and create a club. Our testing was overall successful and the test user didn't find it difficult to browse through clubs and create one themselves. The only issue was the page tracker we introduced as our solution club member accountability. 

Final Thoughts

Although I believe the feature integration was successful, additional rounds of testing to confirm user's
understanding of CTA buttons and ability to quickly understand the page tracker's purpose in the book club.